How smart are animals?

There is always someone popping up with new evidence that beasts have intellectual capacities traditionally thought of as exclusively human. Researchers from St Andrews University, for example, have just reported that bottlenose dolphins use "signature whistles" to identify each other, just as humans use names. Nor is this ability confined to mammals with large crania. A paper by Alan B Bond and Judy Diamond of the University of Nebraska reports that bird-brained spectacled parrotlets (the smallest parrot in the world), white-tailed black cockatoos, galahs and budgerigars all use "individual discrimination contact calls" too.

Human pride was further bruised last month in a paper in Nature that claimed starlings can do what millions of school leavers can't: master basic grammar. And we surely don't need scientists to prove that cats possess the most distinctive human capacity of all: a sense of inherent superiority over all other creatures.

However, there are always sceptics at hand to accuse these researchers of anthropomorphism. For instance, while it may be true that dolphins emit sounds that are unique identifiers, to say these are names Disneyfies nature. After all, cars can recognise unique electronic keys, but that doesn't mean keys have names that cars understand. Similarly, Noam Chomsky rejected the starlings research, saying that the birds were merely counting rattles and warbles. Still, we have come a long way if avian mathematics no longer impresses.

But anthropomorphising animals is not the only way to cut humankind down to size. We can also zoomorphise humans, describing our characteristics in animalistic terms. For instance, we can accept that dolphins "merely" recognise unique identifiers, but claim that human name-using is no more than this anyway. Long before Darwin, Hume similarly zoomorphised the human power of empirical reasoning, which he claimed we "possess in common with beasts" and which "is nothing but a species of instinct or mechanical power." In other words, it's not that animals are as intellectual as we are; it's that we're as irrationally instinctive as they are.

However you look at it, the crude human/animal dichotomy has surely had its day. As Homer Simpson said to the woman who admitted that she had perhaps been wrong to think he was an animal, and that his daughter was right to say he was a decent man: "You're both right."